Glass Bead Game of the Week (3)
Robert L. Oldershaw
This week's winner is an archetype of credulous Glass Bead Game
playing: Darwin's Legacy by Leonard Susskind [aka the king of string].
Published in Physics World (July 2009).
Purporting to be a tribute to the great scientist Charles Darwin, this
piece of work is really a vehicle for tooting the string theorist's
horn by proposing a mind-bogglingly fatuous analogy between Darwin's
Evolution and String "Cosmology".
Here is a sample: "Let us begin with the DNA of the universe. ...
String theory is the key. It supposes that at extremely small
distances space is a complicated higher-dimensional manifold with
many ... tiny "extra" dimensions ... ; it is composed of "Tinkertoy"
elements called fluxes, branes, moduli, orientfolds (and more) all
arranged on a tiny knot of higher-dimensional space called a Calabi-
Yau manifold. The Calabi-Yau manifold is like the basic spine of the
DNA molecule, ... " And so on in relentless intoxicated delusion.
Do not be alarmed - the problem is not with your eyes or brain [at
least I hope not].
Did the editors of Physics World have any doubts about this piece of
whatever, or is anything the "king of string" writes absolutely
correct by definition?
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Some honorable mention Glass Bead Games - just 4 out of scores of
equally unscientific "pieces of stuff" that are equally deserving of
note are as follws.
1. "Wrapped brane gas as a candidate for Dark Matter"
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0907/0907.2495v2.pdf
2. "Gravitational Waves from Broken Cosmic Strings ..."
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0903/0903.4686v2.pdf
3. Quintessential Kination and Thermal Production of Gravitatinos and
Axions"
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0809/0809.1982v1.pdf
4. "Higgsinoless Supersymmetry and Hidden Gravity"
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0907/0907.2988v1.pdf
This is New Age babble that is completely untestable in any practical
manner.
This is not science.
RLO